


divides

by JadeLupine



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: 2000s Britain, Colonial India, Homophobia, Hurt/Comfort, Love, M/M, Many Time Periods, Modern America, Nazi Germany, Parenthood, Racism, Reincarnation AU, Renaissance Era, Romance, Sex, Social Issues, eternal love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-22
Updated: 2016-01-22
Packaged: 2018-05-15 14:54:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5789620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JadeLupine/pseuds/JadeLupine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Society throughout history has been divided and divided like a small cake at a big party. Levi and Erwin are reincarnated again and again, lives blurring into each other - yet there are more and more divides that crop up every time, preventing a love that lasts. But they will find it, Erwin swears through clenched teeth by the light of a maudlin candle. They will find it - and it does not matter how many centuries they live and die.</p><p> </p><p>  <i></i><br/>He wants to know what he can do, what does Erwin want, what does he need from him and his voice is still so gentle and it hurts, physically, like a skinned knee or a scraped elbow, how much he loves Erwin so he turns on him, caged animal fast.<br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	divides

**Author's Note:**

> hi sons
> 
> ok so this is a lil prompt from vivelaeruri to me on Tumblr, and i liked it so much i wrote a oneshot about it!
> 
> they wanted a modern reincarnation AU with eruris running into each other.
> 
> also, since we don't know which time period snk is set in, my idea of reincarnation flits about time periods.

### ///

Erwin is absolutely not looking out for Levi, and he is beginning to grow weary of the astonishing regularity in which Levi seems to flicker into corners of their existences, or they stray, unseeing, into the corners of his, whichever it is.  He would be frustrated with this, but frustration is too hot and unnecessarily busy an emotion, so he folds it carefully and puts it away.

 Still, it is a sign of all that is not correct with the world that he keeps catching glimpses through windows and crowds, glimpses which he does not think he should be able to see so easily – he catches sight of a man in a brown coat, or a dark slop of black hair, and ducks his mind back into the shadows without even wanting to expend the energy to discover if his glimpses were correct.

 He supposes that they have accrued so many unaccountable debts between them that they cannot help but stumble against each other’s worlds, blurring lines that ought to remain fixed.

-  
  “It’s a tosser sort of club, innit?” Levi comments, while he is on one side of the table with two empty cups of tea and half a dozen books Erwin is reviewing for a course, and he is on the other side slowly disappearing into a mass of papers. Erwin looks up. His glasses are crooked.

“Depends, truly, on your definition of tosser…”

“Sorta like you, yeah?” Levi laughs, his hair shines. “Oxford tosser, professor at a university, researching origins of language and shit.”

“Well,” Erwin pushes his glasses up his nose (he does not wear contacts even though it is 2001 and they are in London - hub of modern thought). “Well, you are at the University of Warwick now, being taught by me. Doesn’t that make you a tosser?”

  “That’s just cause I was too handsome for London,” Levi pulls a wry face, wrinkling his nose.

“And what a revelation that is.” Erwin leans over the mess of papers and books and tea things and kisses him, neatly and tenderly, on the forehead, and again, lingering, on his mouth.

 “We cannot continue,” he says against Levi’s hair, obscurely comforted yet predictably saddened. “You are only eighteen.”

“Why not?” Levi shoots back, hand pausing. He had been writing an essay earlier but stops now, his handwriting already somewhat illegible. “Why can’t we be together, bastard? Eighteen is legal, innit? Eighteen’s fuckin’ fine where I come from. You’re only bloody thirty five, stop talkin’ like you lived through Noah and his fuckin’ flood.”

“No, Levi.” Erwin rubs his temples – looks at Levi’s scuffed Nikes and dirty jeans. “We cannot be together now. Levi, you must understand the implications of our relationship on your academic career and mine.”

“It’s cause I’m poor, bastard, why don’t you say it?” Levi’s lip curls in a snarl, his eyes widening. He reaches out and swipes everything off the table, the other patrons in the club shrinking backward. “Say it. Say I’m from the fuckin’ East End, and you’re from Exeter like a goody-two-shoes prick and you’d rather sit with your historical documents than be with _me_?”

“Levi, keep your voice down.” Erwin’s eyes close in dread. “Please – I love you, but you’re my student and are not permitted to address me like that.”

“No fear for that,” Levi gets up, his chair clunking on the floor. “I’m transferring degrees to Sheffield. You can fuck around here and get your tenth phD or whatever fuck. Go lick the Queen’s bum while you’re at it, _pouf_.”

-

There was no physical representation of a new beginning. The world did not wipe itself clean when it was instructed to. As a boy Levi had wanted to press nature into a calendar’s firm structure, to find Erwin on a fixed date rather than bursts of unpredictability. But the year is 1938 and there is a yellow star - twinkle twinkle - on Levi’s chest.

“How very scientific of you,” Erwin murmurs into his hair. He rests a hand against the cold glass of Levi’s wide shop-room windows. The wind teases the tall grass beyond the porch into a choreographed dance , grey snow sliding off their steps wetly.

It is the 1st of January on the last year of their world (for after that comes the camps and death) and everything looks exactly the same.

“You can’t protect me like this forever,” Levi tells him. The warm fog of Erwin’s handprint against the window fades. “Just send me to those camps. It won’t be that terrible. You’re a soldier - you can’t hide a Jew. If they find me, you’re dead. They lock up homos too. Just let go of me, bastard.”

“No, I’ll not.” Erwin’s voice is heavy. “But I’ll have to do something.”

Levi twists in his arms to rest the curve of his palm against the broad chest.

“Let’s get married,” he muses, his voice delirious. In Erwin’s bedroom, two hours before, he’d agreed with the easy acquiescence of welcoming the inevitability of death. There were universal invariants, and then there was he and Erwin, destined to meet and meet but never love.

Erwin grins tiredly.

“Til' death do us part?”

“Don’t fuck around.”

Fuck around? It was all they could do in this country. Germany in the future, Levi knows, will be full of guilt for its’ actions now but there has always been this undertone of broiling hatred that Levi knows will continue forever. They hate him, they hate Jews – they hate the blacks in America and they hate the Indians, the Japanese. They love only Erwin, with his golden hair and high cheekbones and the damn problem was that he loved Erwin too.

“It’s not Germany.” Erwin mutters. “Not the Fatherland. It’s merely… the regime.”

“People _hate_ each other, Erwin.” Levi spits. “Germany, England, Africa, India, Australia. Everyone hates people who don’t look like them. That’s why we can’t be together. That’s why we’ll never be together.”

“But America is good – I hear. America is kind. I’ll send you there.” seriousness drips again. “You’ll be safe there.” 

Levi lived the American dream, after that.

Divorced from the only man he had loved, poor yet believing he will one day come into a fortune and return to the crumbling Germany with a badly painted car and a white fence, yet nobody inside to fill it.

-

The Renaissance burns with fury.

Walls are thin, betraying secrets. Earlier he’d pressed a gentle hand over Erwin’s lips and he’d tasted hundreds of words on his palm.

“Stay still,” Levi whispers, his brush pressing on the canvas. He was using Erwin to model for a nude, a portrait of Samson in all his glory. Erwin’s hair was long but it tumbled down in locks till his wide shoulders and slim waist and Levi wants to sin. He paints furiously, beautifully – his strokes wide and wet, impasto. He makes Erwin take off more and more clothing, he delights in the dripping of sweat down carved abs and smatters of hair.

It’s good, the noise on either side of them, the hot press of air outside the  room. It makes them feel safer than they are, and when Erwin begins to become aroused as Levi strips off layers in the heat, it is masked by the sounds of other people’s voices, when the lamp breaks against the wall in the midst of heated sex it is covered by someone else’s celebration. This is 1512 and they are not allowed to live.

He wants to know what he can do, what does Erwin want, what does he need from him and his voice is still so gentle and it hurts, physically, like a skinned knee or a scraped elbow, how much he loves Erwin so he turns on him, caged animal fast.

He backs him up against the wall.

“Say you hate me,” he demands. “Or that you wish I hadn’t done it, or that you don’t understand why I did it. Say you’re a fucking fag, Erwin, or else you’ll have to hate me forever.”

Erwin shakes his head.

“I can’t, I can’t do that, Levi.” His hands shake and he drops the pair of scissors he carried for the picture. He begins to take on the pathetic quality inherent in all half-clothed men. He places a large hand on Levi’s chest (he could crush him, but why would he?)

“I have a wife and children. My books are published by the Church. I cannot live in sin like you.”

Levi sinks to the floor and tastes the salt of tears - it is strangely unromantic. He takes up the brush again, fastens his tunic and begins to paint out Erwin’s long golden hair – add shadows to his eyes and hollows in his cheeks. He is painting Samson after his hair was cut – Erwin after his battle was lost and his arm was gone.

-

It surprises him, but only because he wasn't listening. If he'd listened, really listened, to the way Levi said goodnight, to the rolling cadence of his voice when he paced their floor upstairs, to the hum in his throat when he turned away from Erwin in the mornings, he would have been hearing goodbyes for a long, long time.

Because of the rolling r’s in Levi’s accent and the skin that was the warm colour of chai-tea, and the fact that they were in India in 1920 - that no matter Levi’s accent only had a touch of nativity - he did not belong to Erwin. For Levi prayed to idols and he took off his shirt in temples, for his eyes were black next to Erwin’s blue, that Erwin had the right to demean him and step on him - perhaps show a superior exchange of friendship. But marriage (or love) was out of the question - and Levi begins to pack.

“Where will you go?” Erwin leans against the doorway, unflaggingly _English_ in his suit and loose cuffs. “Why can’t I come?”

“Because you bastards are tearing apart my country.” There is anger in Levi’s tone, and he turns to look at Erwin. Beautiful, he thinks - Levi looks so beautiful with his smooth skin and swollen lips and with the way his bottom eyelids were lined in kohl. But it was that beauty that prevented him from loving Levi as he deserved to be loved, his sheer Indian features that were so similar to those of the English apart from the tones and colours.

“Come to England with me.”

“And be treated worse than I am already?” Levi laughs, his teeth a flash of white. “You know I hold a phD in History - and I have to clean tables here? Here, in _my_ country? You think they will treat me any better in yours? There are a thousand, a million people like me, Erwin. Qualified, willing - yet too damn brown for your jobs.” 

He doesn't talk to Erwin further as he packs. He flits around their bedroom like a ghost trapped haunting unfamiliar territory. Erwin tries to touch him, tries to hold him, tries to make him just be still. But Levi slips out from under his arm, holds his wrists by his sides and kisses him with her lips and eyes closed.

“Come to England, please.” Erwin begs. “I will do anything for you.”

“I’m not saying India is perfect.” Levi whispers. “I’m not saying anything like that. My country is fraught with problems, it is filled with caste systems and inequality. Perhaps that is why we have stayed with you British for so long, our nature of hierarchy.”

He sighs, shuddering

“Don't ask me to change my mind,” He says, like they're arguing about facts and evidence. “I must leave to Kashmir. It’s the only place you fuckers haven’t touched.”

“Come to England.” Erwin says again, ineffectual.

“Fuck off!” Levi snarls. He lapses into a stream of Hindi and Erwin is captivated by love again, but it hurts. It’s so endearing - but it hurts.

He does not try to touch Levi again.

Levi realizes by the door that he half expects (more than half, he is waiting for it) Erwin to call out for him, to chase him down and beg. Expects him to explain it all away - that Indians were inferior, _damn it_ , why look for good jobs he never deserved to break him apart and put him back together with the seams slightly crooked but together, whole. He'd been ready to argue with Erwin, to wipe tears and back his way into the train station like a trapped animal. He’d expected him to do _something_.

“I’ll go to England. We should all...” Erwin rams a fist on the glass - it doesn’t crack. “We should all have stayed there.”

Erwin waves from the window and turns away. Only then does he cry, staring at the bed they had written poetry, listened to ghazals and made love in.

it hurts more this way, really. Because Levi was right.

-

And once there is an evening: it is snowing, and the sun has barely set safely low, and he is restless again, so Levi has been wandering, tasting dim colours, the glimmers of sound, the thin pale flickers of dreams like will o’ the wisps skimming the surface of the world –

 Erwin is walking towards him, almost tripping over branches, his hair like a golden nest; he has just come home from a trip; not a very long one; they catch each other, and their greeting is entirely wordless; there is brightness in his smile beneath the spectacles and in Levi’s dark hair flecked with snow –

“Idiot -” Levi kisses him. “Don’t go on more of these school trips, will you? Eren’s getting testy, so I fed him early and convinced him it’s nap time. Armin’s doing his damn Maths homework and I don’t even know what the hell a function is so you got to do that bit too.”

“Come on in then,” Erwin smiles. “Let me tell you three about the War memorials.”

“Papa, can you show me how to do quadratic equations?” Armin, only in seventh grade yet taking ninth-grade Maths lessons held out his books. “Daddy’s pretending not to know, and Eren’s being really annoying with his truck impersonation.”

“I’M NOT EREN!” Eren screeched, from somewhere around their feet. “I’m not Eren! I’m X9 200, the biggest monster truck ever!”

“Didn’t I tell you to get that monster truck ass off to bed?” Levi picks him up and dusts off his knees. “Stop crawling around, you’re three.”

“I’m a _man_ ,” Eren proudly lets Armin know, as Erwin finishes explaining the equation.

"Armin, I'm a MAN!" Eren pokes Armin in the eye.

"Okay, _man_ ," Armin sticks his tongue out at his little brother. "Remember that the next time you cry because Dad told you Santa doesn't exist and it's his 'hard cash' that buys your present. Man."

"To my credit," Levi yells over the new ruckus Eren was creating at remembering the death of Santa, "You both kept going on about him so damn much it was irritating to say the least.

“Next time,” Erwin sighs, scratching his hair with the pencil, “Next time you ask Dad these math stuff, okay Armin? He’s an engineering major, so don’t listen to how he pretends not to know anything.”

“Just cause I took engineering doesn’t mean I’m good at this kiddie math rubbish.” Levi complains, trying to extricate a Lego car from between Eren’s teeth. “Let _go_ you little monkey, that car cost more than it cost to marry Erwin.”

“Did it, though?” Erwin winks significantly. “Did it _really?_ ”

“Get lost.”

The sun sinks fully, and there is only the dim lights of stars - and they are gloriously joyful. Divides still bridge them - but they have learned to put their shoes firmly across the cracks that separate them in this world. They have spent eternity searching for a time in which they will be accepted that they have not realized (not until this life, at least) that the only people that have to bridge the divides are themselves.

**Author's Note:**

> i swear this started as a romance fic but ended as a social commentary idek.
> 
> please do comment, i really appreciate anything anyone has to say about my work. thank you very much!


End file.
